GIF Movie Gear

I've been using GIF Movie Gear for some time now and will always grab it whenever I need to do any serious animation quick and easy with superior results. This is the newest version (Version 3.0) and Gamani is making an already good product even better! This program although is relatively easy to use will have you creating animations that can be used in many popular applications. Create them for show, use them in your presentations, or make a few for the Web. GIF Movie Gear makes it a snap and will build your animation and insert the needed HTML commands for your browsing pleasure.

The window contains four main parts:
a.. The menu bar
b.. Two toolbars
c.. The animation view
d.. The status bar.
The menu bar of course has all of the program's main commands. The top toolbar contains additional ones of those commands in a quickly accessible format. The lower toolbar has some quick "shortcuts" to the frame and animation properties. The status bar of course gives you some fast information about the animation such as current size, download speed, etc.

Where you of course do most of your work is the main window area. The animation's frames are displayed as a collection of filmstrips that can be oriented either horizontally or vertically. Each strip contains as many frames as can fit in that direction in the window. Multiple strips are then displayed next to each other and scrolled to show more strips. The frames are always ordered for quick reference starting from the top left of the window. To begin you will open an image, add frames, and adjust the intervals between frames to create your animation. If you would like to get more detailed, go ahead, all the capabilities are there.

You won't have to worry much about palette conflicts as Movie Gear allows you to adjust it accordingly to a self-adapting global palette, Merge it with a global palette, Map it to a current global palette, Map it to Web a "Color Cube" Palette, or Use a Local Palette.

What I liked also was being able to make changes on the fly. You can make single changes to single frames or make changes globally with only a few clicks of the mouse. Also, a great feature is the ability to blend animations. By that I mean you can start with one image (a still or animation) and then merge another image along with the original. Say you want to make animation on top of a steady, still background. Start with the background picture and blend the animation, position it, and synchronize it right on top!

Performance
User Friendly
Cost
Ease of Installation
Support
Reviewed by Robert Hall

Purchases can be made online from their Web site or through the order forms via the Help files.